WRITING

FRAMES & RLP

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When I was teaching persuasive writing, I always began with frames—a general structure on which to hang ideas. The 5-paragraph essay I was taught when I was an adolescent seems pretty basic, but it’s not a bad place to start. An introductory paragraph explains the issue and ends with a thesis, the main idea. Three body paragraphs offer three supporting reasons. The conclusion restates everything. I generally added another paragraph just before the conclusion reviewing opposing views and explaining why they’re wrong.

It’s a beautiful dress and the embroidery tells many stories. As a visual and verbal artist, I care how everything looks on the page. Every word. Every line-break. This work was conceived by the visionary artist Kirstie Macleod. “The garment has been worked on by ‘367 women/girls, 11 men/boys and 2 non-binary artists from 51 countries‘, according to RedDressEmbroidery.com.“ Follow a link here to learn more about the Red Dress Project.
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TIRED

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Twenty-twenty-four was a great year for finding my way in editing and understanding my own work on the page.

A story, two reviews, and a novel found homes. All of them needed revision after acceptance. It’s the way things work in publishing. I revised. I will be asked to approve edits on that short story. I’ll manage.

Seven drafts of the novel alone. I am so very tired of revision that I wrote in my secret revised 2025 Resolutions not to write or work on any fiction this entire year. Nothing. Make a quilt or knit a sweater or weave, I promised. Do all those things. Blog. Send emails. No work on fiction. Don’t try to revise anything old. Don’t look for anything new to write. No fiction for the duration! Just a month before, my goal had been to complete a new and polished draft of A SINGLE FACT, and now I can’t bear to think of doing that.

This is what I should be working on: something with these glorious greens and violets, or the Coral Sea warp, or the pink-striped sweater…
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2025 new year

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This is one of my favorite photos. It’s my desktop image just now.

Gary caught me working on this and when I told him it was a new blog post, he said, “Finally!” I had “resolutions” for 2024. Some of those plans fell apart and some went better than I dared hope and shifted my goals. Toward the end of the year I began making plans for 2025. Those have shifted too.

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WRITING DOWN THE DAYS

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Consider this post my attempt to park the bike and watch the water.

I am nearly two thirds through NaNo month, and I have logged 100k words on the site. This was my 7th NaNo reaching fifty thousand words. I have written entire novels of 75k during NaNo in past years, usually beginning with a short story and then forging on.

When I first saw her on our way north, I disapproved. Surely, an electric bike was unnecessary on the flat sand. Surely, this young woman didn’t need electric-powered assistance, and it couldn’t be doing the bike any good. But on our way home there she was watching the waves, her bike parked well up on the shore. The next day, she was walking.
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HELLO AGAIN

/ janpriddyoregon / 8 Comments

Many things have happened that got in the way of blogging, but the gist is: Facebook, a minor medical issue that got complicated (not mine and mostly okay now), and developmental editing of my novel. Reading. And now NaNo.

I am told I should explain about NaNo. National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is November. It is online, motivational (for me), free, as private or public as you want it to be, and I’ve done it before a few times. Each morning this month, I write on my laptop—the laptop I am using to write this long-overdue post—and then I post my progress on the NaNoWriMo website.

Gary waits quietly in the other room.

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I’M DANCING AS FAST AS I CAN

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The first time I ran the Hood to Coast relay, I was not expecting 96° on my first leg. Six miles in the heat of day was entirely new to me. I ran in the mornings in temperatures below the 60s. But I was in the middle of my life and managed to maintain about 9-minute miles even in heat. I did see people drop on the course, and one poor runner had collapsed from heat exhaustion. Someone tried to hold her up without getting wet himself while someone else trained a fire hose on her.

After the residency I feel a little bit like I’ve had a firehose on me for a week. Yes, that tired. But good too.

I know most people prefer the sun, but I was grateful to find beach weather when we got home! It’s restful weather.

More about writing, goals, and recovery…

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The first time I ran the Hood to Coast relay, I was not expecting 96° on my first leg. Six miles in the heat of day was entirely new to me. I ran in the mornings in temperatures below the 60s. But I was in the middle of my life and managed to maintain about 9-minute miles even in heat. I did see people drop on the course, and one poor runner had collapsed from heat exhaustion. Someone tried to hold her up without getting wet himself while someone else trained a fire hose on her.

After the residency I feel a little bit like I’ve had a firehose on me for a week. Yes, that tired. But good too.

I know most people prefer the sun, but I was grateful to find beach weather when we got home! It’s restful weather.

More about writing, goals, and recovery…

Continue reading →

The first time I ran the Hood to Coast relay, I was not expecting 96° on my first leg. Six miles in the heat of day was entirely new to me. I ran in the mornings in temperatures below the 60s. But I was in the middle of my life and managed to maintain about 9-minute miles even in heat. I did see people drop on the course, and one poor runner had collapsed from heat exhaustion. Someone tried to hold her up without getting wet himself while someone else trained a fire hose on her.

After the residency I feel a little bit like I’ve had a firehose on me for a week. Yes, that tired. But good too.

I know most people prefer the sun, but I was grateful to find beach weather when we got home! It’s restful weather.

More about writing, goals, and recovery…

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RESIDENCY, the last day

/ janpriddyoregon / 8 Comments
In case you are unfamiliar, this is what in 1850 the British called a “monkey-puzzle tree” and some Native peoples called pewen (scientists call it Araucaria araucana), which is native to central and southern Chile and western Argentina. Because it resembles prehistoric species, it is also sometimes called an “animate fossil.” It has long been a seed-grown garden tree in west coast US gardens, including Seattle, where I spent most of my childhood and knew this tree as a child. It is usually dioecious, with the male and female cones on separate trees. Midway up and nearer the top in the photo are the cones that, on female trees, produce seeds similar to over-sized pine nuts. These seeds have been gathered and consumed by indigenous peoples through the millennia, and the trees themselves are sacred to some indigenous Mapuche. The Chilean pine has been protected in Chile since 1972. All logging was banned in 1990 and its conservation status was listed as Endangered by the IUCN in 2013. [The species is protected under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) meaning international trade (including in parts and derivatives) is regulated by the CITES permitting system and commercial trade in wild sourced specimens is prohibited.]

Several of my students went on to Pacific University, but that is not the reason I am fond, of course. Today is the last day of events scheduled for the MFA residency.

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RESIDENCY, day 7

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I used the forecast of rain to skip my run, but it’s not raining, and now I feel guilty for still sitting up in bed, draining my second cup of too-strong coffee (the only coffee I like), and listening to Jack Driscoll in a video from January of last year. I was there. In “First, Do No Harm” from January 2023 in Seaside, Oregon, Jack reminds us: find your character on your page, care deeply, even for the flawed characters, especially for their flaws, because that’s what we all are. That story he read got me again. [I hope the link opens.] I have not heard the other two talks that are linked on the residency Bulletin. I’ll need more time to go there.

Marsh Hall at the end of the walk, my favorite entrance to campus.

For Jack, Gary went over to campus and sat on a bench and played “Parting Glass” by the High Kings, the live version where the pipes come in [at 2:32], turned up all the way on his phone, and cried because it was for Jack and because of the pipes and because… We think Jack would like that. We’ve listened to it a few times now.

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